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Philip Linde linde.philip at gmail.com
Mon Dec 13 01:08:08 GMT 2021
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On Sun, 12 Dec 2021 09:46:15 -0500Michael Lazar <lazar.michael22 at gmail.com> wrote:
Speak for yourself. De-facto standards are social proof that a subset
of the community actually wants and will use a feature. Which is much
more convincing to me than a loud minority arguing for (or against)
something based on principle alone.
A de facto standard, as far as it's actually implemented, is at bestevidence that current implementors are willing to to implement it. Thisin itself represents a minority.
The point of a well-defined standard is that while creating thatdefinition might be a social process, learning and implementing itdoesn't have to be. The ideal outcome of a formal, canonical standard isthat an implementor should not have to go spelunking and survey existingimplementation (or indeed this mailing list) to learn what feature seta client or a server is currently expected to implement not to beeffectively broken.
For example, I can go to your capsule and discover your streaming chat.This might have worried me based on just a basic description of aliving standard, but because there is a formal standard according towhich a client handles a response only after the server closes theconnection of the transaction, I can instead treat it as a weirdmutation of the protocol, and generally not worry about the whims ofa few implementors that ignore the spec in various ways. In this way, Iavoid the tyranny of a multitude of "loud minorities" that would havebeen much more disruptive without a canonical specification of theprotocol.
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